← The Plainspoken Classics

Questions & answers

Is everything here really free? What's the catch?

Everything. No accounts, no ads, no trials, nothing for sale. Read online, download EPUB or plain text, stream or download every audiobook. The site exists to keep these texts alive, not to monetize them.

Is there a modern English translation of the Iliad that doesn't sound like Shakespeare?

Yes. Our Iliad is translated directly from Homer's Greek into plain, fast, contemporary prose (all 24 books), and it is free to read, download, or listen to as a 14-hour audiobook with word-exact highlighting.

Where can I get a free Plato that isn't Jowett's 1871 translation?

Right here: every Plato dialogue (all of them, not just the famous ones) in one modern voice, free. The 75-hour audiobook performs the dialogues with a full voice cast: Socrates and each interlocutor get distinct voices.

Are these AI translations actually accurate?

Judge from the published receipts: an independent source-paired audit of hundreds of passages against the original Greek (roughly 97% clean, errors fixed and listed), mechanical completeness checks on every batch, and independence proofs showing no run of 8+ words shared with any previous translation. The method and numbers are public.

Can I use these for a class assignment?

They are openly AI-translated and say so on every page, so follow your instructor's rules. Many readers use them as a fast, clear first read alongside an assigned translation; the accuracy audit and section numbering make cross-checking easy.

What's the longest free audiobook I can fall asleep to?

The complete Plato runs 74.9 hours, Plutarch's Moralia 65.3, Josephus 58.1, Philo 57.1. The player keeps going: when a book ends it rolls into the next, and there is a sleep timer in Settings.

Is there a complete audiobook of Plutarch's Moralia anywhere?

As far as we can tell, this is the only one ever made, in any format, at any price: all 71 essays, 65.3 hours, free. The same is true of the complete Philo, the complete Plato dialogues, and Origen's Commentaries.

Where can I read what Celsus actually said against Christianity?

Celsus survives only inside Origen's reply, Against Celsus, which quotes him at length. Our translation of all eight books is free to read and is a 21-hour audiobook; it is the best single window into the ancient argument between pagans and Christians, with both sides at full strength.

Is there a free modern translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Yes, translated from the Standard Babylonian Akkadian in the electronic Babylonian Library's current scholarly reconstruction, which includes recently recovered lines missing from printed editions. Lost passages are marked honestly instead of invented.

Where can I download Seneca's letters as an EPUB for free?

All 124 letters, translated fresh from the Latin, free as EPUB, TXT, or a 17-hour audiobook. EPUB opens in Apple Books, Kobo, and Kindle.

Who is this for? Why does this site exist?

The economics of translation never worked for most of the ancient library, so masterpieces sat behind 150-to-300-year-old prose. We spend AI compute on what doesn't sell and give it away: for readers, listeners, students, homeschoolers, and researchers who need clean, consistent, open texts.

Can researchers use these texts as data?

Yes. Every book downloads as clean plain text, the whole library is one zip, sources and checks are on the open-data page, and the replication notebook re-runs the independence scans. One consistent voice across authors removes the translator confound from cross-author analysis.

How were the audiobooks made?

Synthesized at home on a single NVIDIA RTX 3060 with Kokoro-82M, an open-weight text-to-speech model, then force-aligned word by word with OpenAI's Whisper so the text highlights as it is spoken. About 18 hours of narration per GPU-hour; the details are in the About panel.

Which books are here?

Fourteen: Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod, Herodotus, Euripides' Bacchae, all of Plato, Plutarch's Moralia, Josephus, Philo, Seneca's letters, Justin Martyr, and Origen twice (Against Celsus, and the Commentaries and Homilies). About 4 million words and 386 hours of audio, spanning nearly three thousand years of composition.

Anything else: askhistory.ai@gmail.com